


When Harald Met Holly

by grayspider1974



Series: Ivar's World [12]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Other, time travelling ginger kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 13:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18032384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayspider1974/pseuds/grayspider1974
Summary: In which a time travelling ginger kid draws on Harald's face with a Sharpie





	When Harald Met Holly

**Author's Note:**

> This is my attempt at writing my own children into a Vikings fan fiction. Holly likes to draw on people like they were Easter Eggs and her brother Eric appears to be a very young incarnation of Perkale (Finnish deity similar to Thor). It also has a reference to one of my favorite Ray Bradbury stories and to Back to the Future.

Harald Hadrada woke, blinking and befuddled. There was a little girl with long, ginger hair and a cute freckled face squatting on his chest with a pen in her hand that smelled mighty strange, and she seemed to be drawing on his face and singing quietly to herself. She looked like she could have been his brother Halfdan's daughter except that Halfdan had no known offspring. "Hello, little one..." Harald said. "What are you doing in my bedroom?"  
"I'm making you pretty," she said. "Don't move...I'm going to put some glitter on you." She reached into a rucksack for a vial of something pink and sparkly. Harald saw that the rucksack was also covered in small, round metallic discs that glinted in the morning light that streamed through his window and hurt his poor, hungover head.   
He groaned, and shut his eyes. "Who are you, kid...and where is your mother?' he heard a giggle and a light snow of tiny particles struck Harald's face. He hesitantly opened his eyes.  
"I'm Holly," the little girl answered. She was actually really cute and would probably grow to be a woman of exceptional beauty some day, although Harald was not partial to gingers because after growing up with Halfdan's incessant shenanigans he had no desire to stink up the bed with a female version of his brother. He was dimly aware of another small figure by the door that looked to be a boy somewhat younger than Holly whose face was painted to look like a skull, but in a cute way. The boy had the odd, moon penny eyes hat Harald had seen once on a rather annoying kantele player from Karelia, wore a dark blue-grey hooded sweater and carried a maul hammer that was nearly as long as he was tall across his shoulders. Harald was rather impressed that the kid could pick such an object up and wondered if he knew how to handle it properly.  
"Ssss....Holly!" the boy said, softly and urgently "Aiti's noticed we're gone! Gotta go, gotta go NOW!"  
"Feh!" said Holly. She turned back to her handiwork. "I think I'm going to paint your nails too...would you like peony pink or princess purple or perhaps sparkly silver?"  
"Holly!" said the boy in the hoodie just as something huge and rather perplexing leaped through Harald's window. It had eight long metallic legs like a spider, and the head of a rather homely middle aged woman with a mole on her upper lip that sprouted eight hairs like the legs of a spider. Her face looked like it would normally be quite jovial but right now she looked mighty annoyed.  
"Holly! Eric! I brought you here to learn about your ancestors, not so you could tag them with...wait, that's not my eyeliner, it's a Sharpie!"  
Holly nodded sheepishly.  
"That's not going to wash off, Holly!"  
"But he looks so pretty now...look!" She pulled a small hand mirror from her rucksack, and Harald saw that the designs she had drawn on his face were indeed quite elegant, though he was not too crazy about the glitter. "I did an even better job on him than I did on Eric!"  
"I warned you about the Butterfly Effect, didn't I? said the spider. "Someone stepped on a butterfly in the Jurassic period, and it altered history so that the Americans elected Donald Trump President! Doc STILL hasn't sorted it out! Hasta la vista, mes amigos...to the DeLorean!"  
Harald sat up and tried to dust the glitter off his face and his pillows, but gave up because it just hung in the air and would probably re-settle on him"You're cute, kid...come back in a decade when you're hot!" he said, and closed his eyes for another hour or two of sleep as the pair of interlopers were hustled out of his bedroom. It was Wash Day, after all and one of the perks of being a bachelor was that he could sleep in on weekends if he wanted to!


End file.
